This is clearly an early demonstration of the sisters’ deep attachment (an attachment that was to last all their lives), but Jane’s motives and feelings remain obscure because we do not hear Cassandra’s voice. How did she feel about being sent away again? After the Southampton debacle, the prospect of going alone to another strange school may well have been terrifying. Jane’s insistence on being included in the scheme might be not just an attempt to stay together, but an act of defiant self-sacrifice not so very far removed from Mrs Austen’s flippant – and, in view of Jane’s near-death experience, rather tasteless – metaphor.
There seems, at the very least, to be a lack of understanding between mother and daughter here. The down-to-earth Mrs Austen was perhaps capable of insensitivity and baffled by her young daughter’s strong feelings. This may be one of the places at which that distance, so painfully evident in the later letters, began to open between them.
The Austen girls were now to be educated at the Abbey House School in Reading. This establishment was presided over by a Mrs La Tournelle (real name Sarah Hackitt, but a suggestion of Frenchness was useful in the field of girls’ education). She was, by one account, a far from academic woman and fit only for ‘doing the work of a housekeeper’: her talents being limited to supervising laundry, ordering dinner and making tea. But her assistant Miss Pitts and a few other teachers provided lessons in ‘writing, spelling, French, history and geography, needlework, drawing, music and dancing’.8
This was a fairly typical curriculum for girls at the time. After learning the basics of reading and writing, a girl’s education diverged from that of her brothers and, while they began to concentrate upon the study of the classics (with some time devoted to mathematics), she would be expected to focus on the more ornamental ‘accomplishments’: modern languages, embroidery, drawing and music.
However, the Austen sisters profited from the Abbey House School’s instruction for little more than a year. At some time during 1786 they returned home to the crowded rectory where their father was engaged in the more serious business of educating young gentlemen. It is not clear how their education continued from this point: whether they were left simply to their own devices, whether masters were provided, or whether their mother found time in the midst of running the large household to teach them. It is unlikely that a governess was employed. At this time ‘a governess was unknown in Parsonage Houses . . . ’9 according to Jane’s niece Caroline.
The girls’ formal education was at an end.
We do not know whether Jane enjoyed her school days or not, because her letters hardly mention them. The majority of Jane’s surviving letters were written to Cassandra and, according to their great-niece Fanny Lefroy, Jane and Cassandra’s ‘full feelings and opinions were known only to themselves,’10. So we can hope that these letters bring us as close to their writer as it is possible to come two centuries on. However, the collection is far from complete.
‘My Aunt [Cassandra]’ wrote Caroline, ‘looked them [the letters] over and burnt the greater part, (as she told me), 2 or 3 years before her own death.’11 Even some of the surviving letters have had passages cut out of them. It may be that some censoring was done during Jane’s lifetime and at her request. ‘Seize upon the scissors as soon as you possibly can on the receipt of this,’ she wrote towards the end of a letter of 1798 which had ranged freely – and not uncritically – over various family concerns.12 Sometimes it is possible to see where comments have been obliterated. For example, in one letter of 1814, a tantalising, ‘Edward is quite . . . ’ remains, but the rest of the sentence has been excised.13
Such a precaution would be necessary in a family which was determined not to argue. ‘Known only to themselves’ Jane’s comments to Cassandra were safe, but they could not be allowed to escape to a wider audience. Like fossils, Jane Austen’s letters must be approached with caution. There are large gaps in the record; conclusions must be tentative.
So it is impossible to know what this silence about school signifies. Ten years after leaving Mrs La Tournelle’s establishment, Jane wrote, in praise of a funny letter Cassandra had sent, ‘I could die laughing at it, as they used to say at school.’14 This one passing reference to the idiom of their companions is the only time the subject is mentioned. Maybe schooldays were just not memorable, or maybe Cassandra destroyed references to them. Neither possibility argues for Jane enjoying the small amount of formal education she received.
Dorothy Wordsworth, however, does seem to have enjoyed her school days. As an adult she reminisced enthusiastically about school and seems to have made many friends there. She attended two schools while in Halifax. At nine years old she was sent to a boarding school in Hipperholme, near Halifax. Very unusually for the day, it seems to have taken both boys and girls, for Dorothy later wrote of a Mrs Wilkinson as ‘teacher of the girls’. She remembered this lady as ‘a most excellent-tempered, motherly and sensible woman’15. This brings to mind the fictional Mrs Goddard who ‘gave the children plenty of wholesome food . . . and . . . dressed their chilblains with her own hands’,16 but does not suggest academic brilliance.
Dorothy stayed only three years in the motherly care of Mrs Wilkinson. On 30th December 1783 she endured another devastating, life-changing loss – the death of her father. At twelve she was an orphan, and an orphan with very little fortune. Her uncles,17 who were now responsible for the care of her and her brothers (and for trying to extract the outstanding debt from the reluctant Lowther), clearly felt that economy was necessary – and a girl’s education was not a priority. William’s education at Hawkshead grammar school continued uninterrupted by his father’s death, but in 1784 Dorothy was removed from the Hipperholme establishment.
However, the five-shilling entrance fee was found to take her to a day school in Halifax and, since her friend Jane Pollard was also a pupil there, Dorothy was probably not unhappy with the change.
This school was run by the two Misses Mellin, who were, like Aunt Threlkeld, members of the Northgate End congregation and, considering Mr Ralph’s enthusiasm for ‘trying everything’, their curriculum might be expected to be a little broader than that of girls’ schools in general. So it is quite disappointing to read, in an advertisement for Miss Mellin’s school which appeared in 1788, that, ‘the greatest Care and Attention will be paid to the Health, Morals and Accomplishments of the young Ladies.’18
It does not sound like an extensive education, but Dorothy’s health, morals and accomplishments were cared for by the Misses Mellin until she was fifteen, when the need for further economy took her away from Halifax altogether.
Dorothy had spent six years in schools, which was longer than many girls of her time and class. But when Thomas De Quincey met her twenty-three years later, although he found her to be ‘a person of very remarkable endowments intellectually’, he did not consider her well-educated. ‘Her knowledge of literature was irregular,’ he said, ‘and not systematically built up. She was content to be ignorant of many things.’19
Perhaps Jane’s low opinion of girls’ schools was well founded.
Jane and Dorothy’s experiences draw attention to the weaknesses in girls’ education at the end of the eighteenth century. There was a purpose to a boy’s schooling: he must acquire the grounding in classics which prepared him for university. For girls – to whom higher education was closed – there was no such aim, and the decisions taken by the Austen and Wordsworth elders demonstrate that a girl’s schooling could be a rather desultory affair, very much at the mercy of family crises and contingencies.
‘Everybody knows,’ wrote Jane’s niece Caroline (in the middle of the next century), ‘that a hundred years ago, there was not much trouble taken with the education of young ladies.’20
What a girl learned, and how thoroughly she learned it, depended, to a large extent, on the individual herself. ‘Such of us as wished to learn, never wanted the means . . . ’ says Elizabeth Bennet, describing the education of herself and
her sisters. ‘Those who wished to be idle certainly might.’21 This may also have represented the situation at Steventon after Jane and Cassandra returned from Reading.
There was a great deal written about the deplorable state of female education at the time, and much of it focused on girls like Jane and Dorothy: girls whose fortunes were negligible, and whose futures were, as a consequence, extremely uncertain. Since girls were not being prepared for university, what was their education for?
Laetitia Matilda Hawkins raised a remarkable argument against women undertaking exacting intellectual study – it tended to make them frown and look ugly. ‘That we are not designed for the exertion of intense thought,’ she reasoned, ‘may be fairly inferred from the effect it produces on the countenance . . . The contracted brow . . . the motionless eye-ball . . . can give nothing to soft features that is not unpleasant.’22 The conclusion suggests that Laetitia Matilda herself was not so careless of her appearance as to undertake much intense thought.
Most writers agreed that it was private, domestic life for which a woman should be prepared, and that, of course, meant marriage. Hannah More believed female education should consist of more than the conventional ‘accomplishments’ such as music and drawing, because ‘when a man of sense comes to marry, it is a companion whom he wants and not an artist . . . it is a being who can comfort and counsel him . . . one who can assist him . . . soothe his sorrows and educate his children.’23 For conservative writers like More a woman should set a moral and spiritual example to her husband and family. Therefore, the purpose of a girl’s education was ‘to enable her to regulate her own mind, and to be useful to others.’ 24 Restraint and service were the guiding principles of a woman’s life.
Even the radical Mary Wollstonecraft believed that a young woman should be prepared for marriage. ‘A woman may fit herself to be the companion and friend of a man of sense,’ she wrote, ‘and yet know how to take care of his family.’25 But Wollstonecraft acknowledged that not all girls were heading towards a guaranteed marriage, and she lamented the difficulties faced by ‘Females, fashionably educated, and left without a fortune’26: women who had little chance of securing that highly desirable, but rather elusive, man of sense (whose sense too often prompted him to look for a wife with money). Mary Wollstonecraft pointed out that, apart from being a companion, teacher or governess – all three of which careers she tried herself and heartily disliked – ‘The few trades which are left [for women to follow] are now gradually falling into the hands of the men, and certainly they are not very respectable.’27 There is a reminder here of Philadelphia and her training in millinery.
Priscilla Wakefield went further. She put forward the innovative idea that, properly prepared, genteel women would be capable of supporting themselves, and she was delightfully practical in her suggestions of the professions they might take up in order to ‘procure for themselves a respectable support by their own industry.’ The trades of literature, miniature painting, the making of patterns for calico, and landscape gardening, were all, she suggested, suited to impoverished gentlewomen, though acting certainly was not.
Wakefield also had a surprisingly modern-sounding solution to the problem of men appropriating all the respectable crafts: female solidarity allied to the power of the consumer. Women ‘of rank and fortune’, she suggested, ‘should determine to employ women only, wherever they can be employed: they should procure female instructors for their children: they should frequent no shops that are not served by women: they should wear no clothes that are not made by them.’
Unfortunately, most of the professions in her list remained closed to women until the latter decades of the nineteenth century. But it is interesting that the first possible employment that she mentioned was literature, which, she said, ‘affords a respectable and pleasing employment, for those who possess talents and an adequate degree of mental cultivation.’ Female writers were becoming increasingly conspicuous during the eighteenth century and Jane and Dorothy, as they grew up, would have become aware that this was a possible occupation for women, though it had its limitations. The problem, as Priscilla Wakefield pointed out, was that ‘the emolument is precarious, and seldom equal to a maintenance.’ However, it might still be useful to a lady in straitened circumstances, for ‘it may yield a comfortable assistance . . . and beguile many hours, which might otherwise be passed in solitude or unavailing regret.’28
Writing would never make a woman’s fortune, but it might earn her some pocket money and take her mind off her problems.
Jane and Dorothy were to be among those women ‘left without a fortune’ upon the death of their fathers. Dorothy would, belatedly, gain a little money of her own when the Lowther case was finally settled, but Jane’s father made no provision for her in his will and she had no expectations from any other source. To what extent could the education that these two girls received be expected to help them? Did it supply any means of supporting themselves? Did it prepare them for dependence and life on a restricted income?
It seems likely that both girls learned languages to some extent. A Mr Martin, teacher of French, Italian and Spanish, is recorded as being employed at Miss Mellin’s school.29 Dorothy certainly owned and was reading French books in her twenties. ‘I should like to read French with you’ she wrote to Jane Pollard in 179430. However, it is unlikely that she learned much Italian at school for, in the same year, William Wordsworth wrote to a friend: ‘My Italian studies I am going to resume immediately, as it is my intention to instruct my sister in that language.’31
In 1815 Jane described herself as ‘a Woman who . . . knows only her own Mother-tongue.’32 However she was probably being over-modest: according to her nephew, she ‘read French with facility, and knew something of Italian.’
Austen-Leigh goes on to remark: ‘In those days German was no more thought of than Hindostanee (sic), as part of a lady’s education.’33 However, Dorothy Wordsworth did think of German as part of a lady’s education. At the age of twenty-six, believing (probably erroneously) that ‘translation is the most profitable of all [literary] works,’34 Dorothy would set about learning the German language in order to work as a translator – going to the length of accompanying her brother to Germany in an attempt to complete this part of her education.
Dorothy was one of those women who ‘wished to learn’, and she did not consider that the time for learning was past when she had outgrown the schoolroom, though her understanding might have seemed irregular to a university-educated man.
There were gaps in Dorothy’s education which she did not attempt to fill, even though she was aware of them. Some of these gaps were the more ornamental accomplishments. ‘You expect to find me an accomplished woman and I have no one acquirement to boast,’35 she wrote when she was 18. Music never played much part in her life and, writing to Lady Beaumont in August 1805 and trying to convey something of her home’s appearance, she attempted a drawing, warning that it ‘will make you smile at my little skill.’36 Evidence of that little skill survives in an endearingly childlike sketch of Dove Cottage.
This lack of the more artistic acquirements reflects the practical, dissenting ethos of Dorothy’s education. She regretted her lack of artistic skill, writing that, ‘I scarcely ever take a walk without lamenting it’.37 With training and practice, she might have become a competent artist, as, in her journals, she frequently considered landscape with an artist’s eye.
Jane, in her comfortable Anglican vicarage, became the more accomplished of the two girls. Henry Austen reported in his brief Biographical Notice that his sister had both taste and skill in drawing. And ‘I believe that a music Master attended at Steventon . . . ’ wrote Jane’s niece, Anna Lefroy.
In Sense and Sensibility it is partly through the arts that Marianne Dashwood assesses sensibility in others. Music is a passion with her and when she judges Edward Ferrars’ suitability as a husband for her sister, her greatest hope is that he will learn to share Eli
nor’s love of drawing. She also forces poor Edward to read poetry aloud in the drawing room – the poetry of William Cowper.
Cowper, according to her brother Henry, was a favourite writer of Jane’s.38 Dorothy too seems to have had read this very popular poet when she was young, and to have approved his championing of simple rural life. The vision of her ideal home which she would describe in 1793 was almost certainly influenced by Cowper’s poem The Task. ‘When I think of the winter’, wrote Dorothy, ‘I hasten to furnish our little Parlour, I close the Shutters, set out the Tea-table, brighten the Fire.’39 It is an echo of Cowper’s lines:
‘Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
. . .
And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in.’40
Poetry would be pre-eminently important in Dorothy’s life, but her willingness to pass over the conventional ‘accomplishments’ by which many young ladies self-consciously defined their sensibility suggests that her particular brand of deep feeling was not an off-the-peg affectation, rather something genuine to be expressed in her own way.
Both these talented girls learned for their own purposes, not for show.
Anna Lefroy recalled that Jane Austen’s piano was sold when the family removed from Steventon, but, ‘when settled at Chawton she bought a Pianoforte and practised upon it diligently . . . in order to recover that facility of fingering, which no doubt she had once possessed.’41As she used to do most of her piano-playing in the early mornings before the rest of the household was awake, it would seem she played for her own enjoyment, not for the kind of display which motivated Mary Bennet and many real women who spent long hours acquiring all those accomplishments.
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